Every year Santa manages to deliver millions of presents to children all over the world – but this year he needs a little help, and you could be just the person he needs. Unfortunately, Santa has fallen ill, and unless you can help to deliver all of his presents, there are going to be a lot of sad children waking up on Christmas day.

Christmas Crisis places you at the reins of Santa’s sleigh as you fly all over the world dropping presents down the chimneys of the house you fly over. It is a race against time, and to ensure the world remains a happy place, you need to achieve a success rate of at least 70% - obviously, if you can hit 100%, so much the better!

As if the prospect of travelling thousands of miles was not enough, on top of having to it all of your housing targets, there are also a number of obstacles to miss. The skies are filled with airplanes that need to be avoid, and with no air traffic controller on hand to help out, it is down to you to keep your eyes open and avoid a collision.

Christmas Crisis is available for both Mac and PX and while it is available free of charge, it is described as donationware. This means that if you like the game, the author would appreciate a donation, although you are not obliged to make one. With simple controls and fun graphics, this is a great game for younger children.

Verdict:

Great fun and easy to jump straight into, Christmas Crisis is a fun romp full of festive cheer.

There's a vast amount to learn, of course, and that's even before you start building your game. But there's plenty of documentation, tutorials, demos and sample projects to point you in the right direction.

The package is now entirely free, too - no annoying limitations, nag screens or anything else. Epic now only requires that you pay a 5% royalty after the first $3,000 of revenue per product per quarter. And even then, you "pay no royalty for film projects, contracting and consulting projects such as architecture, simulation and visualization."

8.48 brings:
- Optimized grass rendering and procedural foliage system preview
- Plugins available in Marketplace
- Improved accuracy for motion blur
- New Tone Mapper
- Support for all the latest VR hardware including Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, Steam VR and HTC Vive, Leap Motion, and Sony's Project Morpheus for PlayStation 4
- "Scrubbable" network replays with rewind support and live time scrubbing
- Visualize the memory footprint of game assets in an interactive tree map UI